everyday life

This was the last day of winter break.  Whit’s stitches were healing nicely and both kids were having some “screen time” with various Apple products.  For some reason I find it charming that Whit’s favorite place to curl up with the ipad is his sister’s bed.  Over and over again, left to their own devices, she will pull the beanbag into a corner behind the chair in the family room, and he’ll hop into her bed.

On Thursday, Grace, Whit and I went to the doctor to have his steri-strips removed and to have his scar checked out.  Apparently it’s healing great.  All I can think is wow that new freckle on his temple shows that I am a little lax about sunscreen.  And, frankly, doesn’t it seem medieval that we still fix skin by stitching it together with a needle and thread?  And, also, at the same time, miraculous?

Friday afternoon, I had the bags all packed with helmets, skates, snowpants, hats, and gloves, preparing to take Grace, her friend Caroline, and Whit skating after school.  Pickup is at 3:00.  At 2:30 the phone rang, and I recognized the school number.  Never a good thing.  I picked up.  “Hello?”  “Lindsey,” the school nurse’s voice was animated.  “Everything’s okay!  But I have Whit here, and there was a group of them in the assembly hall, and, well, his scar has split open.”  “Um, what?” “Well, do you mind coming to get him?  He’s bleeding.”

Bleeding he was, and forlorn, too, when I picked him up.  I teased Nurse K about the fact that she always says, “Everything’s okay!” because, well, if she’s calling me during school hours, pretty much something is not okay.  Right back to our favorite place, the ER.  (aside: thank God for friends I can call and say, hey, do you mind if we skip that whole lovely skating idea and you pick up my daughter instead of the other way around?)

He kind of looks at home there, no?  He watched TV – this time in English – while he waited for the numbing cream to set in.  Two more stitches, right over the scar line of the first seven.

Visual aid.  Again, medieval and miraculous, at the same time.

Sunday morning we finally had our skate.  We were the first people at the club when it opened.  This is a tennis club in the summer and in the winter they flood the courts and open for outside skating whenever it is cold enough.  That’s not that often, actually.  Saturday it had snowed on and off all day and during the night too, so there was a light layer of snow on the ice.

Each of us made tracks and I, of course, photographed them.

Monday morning Whit woke up complaining of a sore throat.  Assuming he was angling to stay home, and that his throat hurt from the dry air, I took him to school.  At 10:30, that same old number on the phone.  I picked up.  “Hi, Lindsey,” Nurse K said brightly, “I won’t even say everything’s okay.”  I laughed.  “It’s not.  Whit just threw up several times.  He has a fever.”  I got in the car, grateful yet again that we live a mile from school.  When I arrived he was more than forlorn.  He was curled up on the bench in Nurse K’s office and looked miserable.  We went home and he lay on the couch and fell asleep while I moved all of my afternoon meetings to conference calls and made an appointment with the doctor.  Intermittently he woke up to run to the bathroom to throw up, and his fever ran up to 102.

At 1:20 we arrived and while we waited to see the nurse practitioner, Whit fell asleep on the paper-covered examining table.  This is definitely a first.  He has a raging case of strep and we went straight to CVS to fill his prescription.  As we waited in line at the pharmacy he tugged on my sleeve and said, “do you have a bag?”  He’d been throwing up into plastic bags in the backseat of the car.  I didn’t.  We rushed out to the parking lot and I helped him curl over the big public trashcan to throw up.  As his little body convulsed in my arms, the cold air raking both of our hair, I wept.  My poor little guy.  He was in such pain, and in such a public way.  What a trooper he was though.  We filled his prescription and headed home.

As we drove home I told him I’d cancel my plans to go out to dinner with some friends to celebrate a birthday.  “Would you like that, Whit?” I asked, looking back at him clutching the empty CVS plastic bag to his chin.  “Well, Mummy,” he answered slowly, “Do you really want to go out?”  I caught his eye in the mirror.  “Well, if you want me to stay home I’d be happy to do that.”  “Well, I’d really like it if you put me to bed tonight,” I saw that he closed his eyes and leaned his head back in his carseat.  Of course, little man.  Of course.  A moment later I asked, “Whit, why did you ask me if I really wanted to go out to dinner?”  His eyes opened and he looked at mine in the mirror.  “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”  Cue the tears.  Again.

He spent the rest of the afternoon sacked out on the couch.  That stuffed Santa dog (dubbed Santa Paws by Grace) was given to him at the ER on Christmas Eve and has become a favorite (even coming to the pediatrician’s office).  For some reason his little bare legs slay me.

He was already feeling better by bedtime, back to his hilarious wise-cracking self.  I must admit, there’s a sweetness to him when sick that I don’t altogether dislike.  Still, I wouldn’t mind if we stayed out of the doctor’s office for a while now (though we have to go back on Thursday to have the stitches removed and next week for his 6 year old appointment).

I hate New Year’s Eve.  I always, always have. Really, really hate it.  I’m only starting to figure out why, though.

It’s not for the reasons everyone assumes.  It’s not because of the whole “it’s amateur hour” thing.  Nor is it because I feel some kind of pressure to have the greatest time ever. It’s not even, now that I am an old lady and mom, because it’s so hard to find a babysitter.

No.  I have finally realized why I hate it so much.  I hate it because if you, like me, feel anxious and sad about the passage of time, well, then New Year’s Eve is just ground zero for pain.

Someone teased me recently, insisting that surely this was a new thing for me, since I’ve had kids. This is absolutely not true.  In fact, midafternoon on the 31st I missed a call from one of my oldest and dearest friends.  Her message said that she still remembered the New Year’s Eve, when we were both in college (prime raging years, no?) and we went out for dinner in Harvard Square and were in bed around 10.  She said it was one of her favorite New Year’s Eves ever.  Mine too.

I can only remember four New Year’s Eves that I stayed up until midnight.  One was in high school, with the girl who was my only true friend at boarding school.  I actually don’t know if we even made it to midnight, though we tried.  She emailed me this week reminiscing about what bad rebels we were, even then.  Two were in the post-college, pre-marriage years, both in New York.  And one was the turning to 2000.  And that year I barely made it. I remember watching about four minutes of fireworks and going straight to sleep.

I’ve always felt a heaviness on New Year’s Eve.  This heaviness, if I really think about it, is an exaggerated version of a sensation I know well: a deep sadness about time’s passage.  Since the eve of 2000, I’ve insisted on being asleep well before midnight on December 31st.  I just can’t take the rawness of the night.  The entire world is poised around the turning of time, and I can’t bear it.  Everybody else seems to be celebrating, and I can’t get away from the poignant, immediate awareness of everything that has always scared me most.

It’s a similar feeling as that that haunts birthdays for me, at least Grace, Whit’s, and mine.  Tangible, evidence of the wheeling forward of time, inescapable proof that our moments on this planet are numbered.  On the whole time’s movement seems an odd combination of quixotic and inexorable, some moments stretching endlessly and others passing with blinding speed.  On New Year’s Eve, though, we come face to face with the truth of another year wheeling around.  We confront the passage of our own lives, accept that we are a step closer to the end and away from the beginning, and this causes me nothing short of anguish.

So that’s why I hate New Year’s Eve.

So.  Christmas Eve.  Everybody is dressed, ready to go to church.  This is without question my favorite church service of the year.  I holler, “Coats on, everyone!” and am met, unexpectedly, with a howl of pain from Grace’s room.  I amble in, expecting bickering over whose pen is whose or something equally critical.

Instead, Whit is clutching his face, which is bloody.  I pry his hands from his eye, and see that blood is gushing out of a cut.

“Jumping on the bed?” I ask him sternly.  He nods at me, putting his hands back up to the flood of blood.

Instantly I know we’re going to the ER.  I wanted to send Matt and Grace to church and just take Whit, someone had to hold the towel to the gushing forehead as we drove, so it turned out we all went.  At Children’s I spent a couple of hours with a very nice doctor.  Whit was given some numbing cream, some anti-anxiety medication and then stitched up.  Attentive readers will note that he also spent his very first Christmas Eve at the Children’s Hospital ER; he’s now averaging 1/3 of his Christmas Eves on earth there.  I think he’s fine with his batting average.  I am not.

The trip to the hospital, while costing me my favorite church service of the year, was almost worth it, because of the sheer comedy that Whit provided while on the medication.  He was basically ragingly drunk all night.  I knew he was ready for stitches (ie fully “relaxed”) when he turned the TV in the room to a show in Spanish and watched, attentively.  When I asked if he wanted to watch something in English he looked at me as if I was stupid and shook his head fiercely.  He turned to me, mid-stitches, with a guffaw, telling me that this was the most fun Christmas Eve ever.  After we left, en route to my parents, he proclaimed  that “this popsicle rocks!”  I wish I had videotaped him.  And yes, I did ask the doctor if I could have some of what he was having.  She said no.

When we arrived at my parents’ house for our annual Christmas Eve with our dearest family friends, I was quite ready for a glass of wine.  Fortunately, it was flowing.  As has been the case in recent years, we sang carols after dinner.  I love this tradition.  The blurry picture above is me flanked by my oldest friend-brother, Ethan, and his father (I’ve written about Ethan’s mother’s death in 1997. It remains a seminal experience for me).  This is as old as friends get, and I adore being with them.

Christmas Day was very mellow.  My parents came over for breakfast and presents, and then Grace, Whit, Matt and I spent the rest of the day together.  We went for a walk, we went to the playground, we played with presents, we read our books.  It was, honestly, quite divine.  As was, in my opinion, my centerpiece (see above).

On Boxing Day, the kids and I drove Matt to the airport early (he was headed to Florida to visit his parents) and then spent the day trying to do as many errands as we could before the snow came.  We walked down to a favorite neighborhood restaurant for an early lunch.  By mid afternoon we were watching various movies and snuggling under blankets as the snow began to flutter from the sky.  My parents came over for an early dinner of (leftover) turkey quesadillas.  Another lovely, mellow day.

And we woke up to 18 inches of snow.  The kids both popped out of bed at 7:00 on the dot, eager to see how much snow there was.  I shoveled out two cars and all around our house.  And we spent the morning sledding.  It’s hard to remain aggravated by the inconveniences of the snow in the face of Grace and Whit’s contagiously sparkling wonder about it.

Tonight I am overseeing their writing thank you notes, in my pajamas, drinking wine on the rocks.  Yesterday, Hilary sent me an email with a link to the New York Times review of Poser, by Claire Dederer.  She noted that after reading the review, and thinking that I’d like the book, she saw that Dani Shapiro had written it, so maybe I had heard of it.  I then took this picture of my bedside table to send to her.  What’s better than a beloved sister who knows me that well?  Also, the book is great.  Can’t wait to crawl into bed with it tonight.